


Let The World Come At You Love

by QuickSilverFox3



Series: Mag7 Summer Swagbag Challenge [7]
Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: M/M, Magical Realism, Period-Typical Racism, Pre-Canon, Pre-Relationship, Soul Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:21:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24777562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuickSilverFox3/pseuds/QuickSilverFox3
Summary: Billy looked to the ocean, the ashes of his home and his family covering him like a second skin, and heard the siren song once more. He picked himself up from the ground, the world around him no longer certain, heart hardened to stone, and began to walk.-Billy follows the song, and finds his knives, and a surprise at the end.
Relationships: Goodnight Robicheaux & Billy Rocks, Goodnight Robicheaux/Billy Rocks
Series: Mag7 Summer Swagbag Challenge [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1789006
Comments: 6
Kudos: 21
Collections: Mag7 Summer Swagbag Challenge





	Let The World Come At You Love

**Author's Note:**

> [ Inspired by this post about Billy's knives!](https://inkformyblood.tumblr.com/post/618819124785774592/1ltreede-mysticalninjakoala-knives-knives)   
> Wriiten for Mag7 Summer Swagbag Challenge for June Character prompt: Write a fic from the point of view of an inanimate object, or make artwork celebrating the role of an inanimate object. [Or at least as close I can get ^^;]

Billy’s first knife called to him, a siren song that stretched across the ocean and invaded his dreams — sending him screaming awake with the taste of iron in his mouth and the slow insidious drip of blood in his ears. The dreams lasted four months — four months of waking with his hands clapped over his mouths as his own terrified screams reverberated inside his chest, four months of praying for guidance to whatever gods or spirits would listen — and they stopped as flames licked up the walls of their home, smoke filling their lungs with black tar and killing them slower than the flames.

Billy looked to the ocean, the ashes of his home and his family covering him like a second skin, and heard the siren song once more. He picked himself up from the ground, the world around him no longer certain, heart hardened to stone, and began to walk.

⁂

The sun beat down overheard, cracking the dirt around their aching bodies, and the siren song rang so loudly in Billy’s ears it blotted out everything else. He was deaf to the groans of the men around him — hammers slippery in sweat soaked and bleeding hands, too exhausted to even think about using them against overseers wielding harsh words and harsher whips — stumbling over the loose earth, bucket knocking against his shins and drawing blood indistinguishable from the dirt covering him. It was so close now that it threatened to consume him, a fire coiling through his bones as he saw the faintest flash of silver, heard the song explode in his mind like the dying of the sun.

It was such a small thing for such a powerful song: smaller than the width of his palm with a coil of engravings wrapping round and round the handle in a dizzying spiral, half covered with dust and dirt. Billy picked it up, heart lodged in his throat, hearing it’s song fully for the first time, the very air around him humming with electricity—

He felt the whip slice through the air mere seconds before it connected — a lightning strike when the sky was achingly clear and bright — twisting just enough to shield his weakened left arm, but it wasn’t enough. 

Dirt exploded around him, blood coating his tongue, white hot pain blotting out everything else.

Voices, loud, panicked, familiar and yet not — so close to his mother tongue it hurt but there were differences he couldn’t ignore.

One voice rising above the others, loud and angry, the roaring of a bull.

Cutting through it all was the song from the small hairpin clutched between numb fingers, and Billy knew what he had to do. Pushing himself up — lightning flashing behind his eyes, blood dripping down his chin as tears he couldn’t afford to let fall prickling reflexively at the corners of his eyes — Billy stood and stared at the red face of the overseer, spit flying from his lips as he roared his disgust to the sky; and let the hairpin fly.

⁂

It shouldn’t have landed. Billy knew how to throw knives, knew the limits of his own skill and knew how to fake far past those limits. 

He was weakened by blood loss — a deadly chill landing deep in his bones that he feared would kill him if a bounty hunter didn’t first — and even now, he couldn’t fight to defend himself, not yet.

The blade should have pierced the overseer’s chest — Billy couldn’t remember his name, didn’t care too, just another death that stained his soul — with a wound enough to distract him so Billy could run, wishing with every step that it had plunged into his throat and silenced his squealing forever. Silver shone in the sunlight as it left his hand — dangerous and beautiful, enough to entice a man across an ocean with it’s song — and it moved, against the wind, against the angle of Billy’s throw. The hair pin shifted upwards and pierced the man’s throat, red blood fountaining down onto the hungry earth, and returned to Billy’s hand with barely a touch as he ran.

It sang to him even now, soft and sweet — almost a lullaby even as it filled Billy’s mouth with the sharp iron tang of blood, heat high in his chest. But it wasn’t complete, sections of the song missing from the full throated chorus he first heard, the song that drew him across the sea. 

There were other blades he was meant to have, other weapons that called his name so sweetly he was unable to resist.

Billy picked himself up, the tangled branches of the tree that gave him shelter from the sudden rainstorm clinging to him like sudden grasping hands, and started walking, heading towards the next siren’s call.

⁂

His second knife brought him his new name.

⁂

“Hey!”

Billy ducked his head further — shoulders hunched like the broken wings of a vulture, and that’s what he was now: carrion eater, soaked in death — hoping that the man would pass him by, and knowing that he wouldn’t.

He stood out here, away from the huddled masses of railroad workers, marked by the colour of his skin and the slant of his eyes. He was marked, and unable to truly hide, and he didn’t want to — fire brewing in his stomach, adding charges and grievances underneath his old name.

“You’re that  _ chink _ .”

Rage was meant to be hot, meant to consume everything in it’s path; but Billy’s rage burned cold, sharpening his focus, turning his blood to sharp shards of ice. The posters bearing his face — or what had been his face before the sun and the wind hardened him, eyes watchful and waiting beneath drawn brows — didn’t bear his name, but now they would.

The siren song was loud in his ears, the hairpin carefully hidden beneath his hat whispering promises of blood and violence — the gun at his hip never whispered to him, lying silent as the grave, except in the moment when he pull the trigger: a roar of triumph hidden beneath the crack of a gunshot. Billy knew another one of his knives was here, the voice deeper and richer than his hairpin, drawing him closer with every burning day spent hidden and every endless night spent walking until his legs threatened to give way beneath him.

Billy turned, slipping the knife from his meal into his hand — blunt and unused, as he picked at his food with his fingers — preparing himself to throw it. It wasn’t the same as his pin, but he could feel the reverberations in the metal and knew it would dance at his command.

The thick, yeasty scent rolling from the man in waves twisted Billy’s stomach, swallowing hard against the hot burst in his throat. The man spoke, shifting from side to side as if trying to brace himself on the deck of the ship, but Billy couldn’t hear his hate filled words as his eyes alighted on the curved knife at the other’s belt. 

He felt his lips draw back in a grin that was a hairbreadth away from a snarl, knowing now that the man’s fate was sealed. The song was louder now, no longer the same terrifying thing he heard as a child, but now sweet and seductive. Billy saw the fear dawn on the man, a slow flicker in the depths of his eyes — something primal and long forgotten, now awakened — and grinned, tasting his victory on the air. It tasted like iron, like liquid silver in his mouth.

⁂

His next knife brought him to Goody.

⁂

Blood misted onto the air in a fine spray, clinging to Billy’s eyelashes like a caress and covering his cheeks — bones too sharp, the hunger too keen in his belly to concentrate on anything but the pull. The man staggered backwards, first one step and then another, disbelief etched onto every feature as he fell. 

Billy’s third knife was tucked into it’s sheath at his belt, the song a low drone — bees lazily flying on a summers day rather than the war cry he was expecting.  _ ‘Wait’ _ the song seemed to say, satisfaction curling through every note, as if this bar in this town was where he was always meant to be. 

Slowly — sharks circling their prey, scenting blood in the water even if it came from one of their own — the men surrounded him, drunken bravado filling their chests with false hope. They looked at him and saw a target, saw the price on his head and what that money would bring him. They didn’t see the scars littering his knuckles, or the knives in his belt. They couldn’t see him as a threat, because he was nothing to them.

Bones broke beneath Billy’s fists — horror dawning on the men like a wave cresting on the beach, realising too late that they were drowning — blood covered his bared teeth, and drew constellations on his skin. He twisted easily out of a lurching grasp, and saw the man waiting in the doorway, rifle slung across his back and gold shining in his mouth. His eyes — blue as the sea that carried Billy to this county, as bright as the morning sky that comforted him as he slept — locked onto Billy’s and Billy heard the steady drumbeat of the man’s fate.

A kick — knocking loose teeth in a choked mess of blood and pink tinged spit, the man groaning his prayers into a broken table — and Billy’s dance was over; turning to face the newcomer fully. The man was beautiful but in the way his gun was beautiful — made for a sole purpose, deadly and perfect in the pursuit of that goal, and yet unsettling alone. 

“A bounty hunter?” Billy asked the man, voice cracking around the strange blunt words.

“I’d like to consider myself a man with a touch more sense in my head than your fallen foes there,” the man said, taking half a step forward and pausing when Billy tapped his fingers against the handles of his blades. They hummed in quiet contentment, the noise rising and falling with the beat of the drums that rang out as the man took another step forward, seemingly deaf to the call of his rifle.

“Speak,” Billy ordered, setting his hat on the remains of the bar and leaning back against it, feeling the skin on his knuckles stretch and burn with even the slightest movement. 

The man bowed — his golden tooth a flash of sunlight in the depths of night — and did as Billy commanded.

**Author's Note:**

> [ My Tumblr!](https://inkformyblood.tumblr.com) Requests are always welcome!  
> 


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